Duplicate contacts only on my iPad from exchange server

Since IOs5 my iPad 2 suddenly starts to duplicate contacts from my exchange server (Office 365), if I go to my server I won´t see the duplicate, only in my iPad 2, if I delete the account and add it again they will dissappear but they will start duplicate one more time.

Just to make sure we're in sync you DON'T have your contacts syncing to iCloud & Office 365, correct?

I definately don't. I only have email syncing to various services, backups to iCloud and contacts/calendar only to Exchange.

If I delete the acocunt and resync, it had no duplicates. But after some time, it "re-syncs" and temporarily erases all my contacts, then starts pulling them down again. At that point I now have duplicates.

Crazy!

If I delete the account, I'm good for a few hours with no duplicates.

At no time do I have duplicates when looking at the exchange acocunt via outlook on my laptop or various PCs.

I had the same problem on my iPad 2 and my new iPhone 4s. It didn't bother me on the iPad because I never used my contacts. Changing to an iPhone made it a big issue!

What was happening in my case is that I have several contact groups in Outlook under contacts...old contacts, backup contacts, etc. iOS was pulling from each group and as such, I was getting multiple copies of some contacts as some are duplicated across several groups.

There was an easy solution. Go to Conacts on the iPhone and iPad. Go to Groups up at the top, and then select which contact group you wan to use and...joila! Duplicates are gone.

we are having same issue here. Currently signed up to Office 365 and Contacts are duplicating randomly on all three devices we set the service with. It is not duplicating on the server or in Outlook, only Apple devices. If I disable Contacts in the exchange settings ... all contacts are wiped (contact list is empty) and if I re-enable them I have correct amount of entires that I have in Outlook and OWA.

I had the same issue, Iphone 4S and iPad 1 IOS 5.0.1 duplicate, triplicate and cuadruplicate Contacts. My Microsoft service is Live@Edu. If I disable and if I re-enable Contacs I have correct amount of entries that I have in Outlook and OWA, but in a few hours or days duplicates or triplicates appear again.

Same issue. Bought new iPad march 18 noticed double contacts in it a few days later. Not duplicated on my iphone 4 though. Yesterday upgraded iphone 4 to iphone 4S and it is now showing dupes also. Does not dupe everything. Just some of the contacts. About 25% of mine. Exchange is fine. And I don't sync contacts in iCloud or any other account.

If I change a contact, seems to replicate to dupes. If I turn off contacts and resync dupes go away. But only for a few hours.

Update. This is clearly an iOS contacts app issue, under iOS 5.1. I checked my diagnostics and usage log (Settings> General>About>Diagnostics & Usage Data ) and it shows that every time I am getting the duplication issue, it is immediately after the Contacts App crashes. I witnessed this as well while trying to edit a contact this morning. The Contacts app crashed when I tried to paste into the notes field. I tried to redo the paste once I relaunched Contacts and now it would not open the entry for edit. Each time I tried to put it in edit mode, it would cancel out. I had seen similar behavior when trying to edit an entry while contacts is loading for the first time, so I checked, and low and behold I had a fraction of my total contacts and it was in the middle of a reload of its own. I let it complete and found that I now had duplicates. It appears that as least in some cases, when Contacts crashes, it launches a full reload of the Contact DB from exchange. However, it does so without deleting those contacts that are still on the phone - which again, at least in some cases, there are some. SO.... APPLE, please take a look at this ASAP it is causing much pain and data integrity issues out here.

BTW, my current plan is to keep Contacts - unlaunched unless I need it. My hope is this will limit the opportunities for it to crash and do this corrupt re-load.

I have a user(of course it's the CEO and no one else), that has two iPhones and an iPad syncing to his Exchange Online account. He has all the devices syncing using ActiveSync with O365 and not Outlook or iTunes. This was only happening on the phones, not the iPad or the Contacts online or in Outlook. This morning I removed all the Sync accounts from his two iPhones and his iPad and set them up one by one and tested to make sure they didn't replicate. The tests went fine and there weren't any issues. This afternoon when he went to add a new contact, it started syncing multiple copies of each contact and does so on each phone and now on the iPad. The iPad and one iPhone are on iOS 5.0 and one iPhone is on iOS 4.0.

After digging through forum after forum(including the Office 365 one above) this seems to be an issue with iOS 5, or iOS in general, more than about Office 365/Exchange Online. There are numerous Google threads about using ActiveSync and Gmail that result in the same issue. This really seems to be an Apple issue. Has anyone received feedback from anyone at Apple about this? From those that have on other forums there is just finger pointing between Apple and Microsoft and Apple and Google, none of them are taking responsibility for this.

My solution was to allow only sync of mail on Apple Devices. This is since Apple will not host domain hosted email. I migrated contacts over to iCloud for now. No longer using Outlook on Windows devices. Now on Day 4 of this structure and efficiently running. Perhaps Apple will annouce domain hosted mail in June/July when iCloud and MobileMe is updated.

I have the same issue with Google contacts. It appears that the contacts with a double first name (i,e, John & Jane Doe get duplicated expotentially more thatn others. I ahve even tried 'and' instead of the character. I use Google gmail in Exchange mode on an iPhone 4, and iPad. I ahve even created three records for each couple (i.e. John & Jane Doe, JohnDoe, Jane Doe) and have deleted work phone numbere from the 'couple' account. I have then gone into settings in my iOS devices and turned off contacts and calendars and 'deleted' records on device. So then I supposedly only had contacts on my Google account. Merged and cleaned up Google contacts on desktop. Confirmed no contacts (visible) on devises. Let that go for a couple of days (hassle) and then reactivated contacts on iPhone only. Days later, not only do I have duplicates, The 'cleaned' contacts like John & Jane Doe with no work numbers reverted back to the orginal popluted fields and contacts (mispellings) that were deleted, reappeared in their incorrect form. So it appears that there is a ghost file somehere on the iOS device (maybe Google). I have thought of 'restoring' my iPhone 4 to original settings and seeing how that works for the under the hood stuff (hassle, but I hate data INTEGRITY issues) but even if that worked, I would know that going forward I would not have solved the issue. I have just switched my business to Googl Apps so I use Exchange with both Google accounts, but this is unacceptable for something so BASIC from two such compnanies. Google? Apple? WTH?

I have an update for everyone. To get around this issue, I decided to move contacts and calendar over to iCloud.

The only 365 service left syncing is mail. I use iPad3 and iPad 2 plus macBook air i7 and an iPhone 4s.

I have office 2011 for Mac installed on my Air. I noticed all contacts were deleted on my Windows PC running Office 2010 after about a week. So experiementally, I added a fake contact on PC it did not show up on my Apple devices until I ran Office Outlook 2011 for Mac. As soon as I ran Outlook 2011 for Mac this contact appeared in Contacts on all apple devices. I only sync iCloud contacts on the air. The box marked contacts on my exchange account with the Air is not checked off. So how do I turn off syncing behind the scenes. Then this contact showed up on my other apple devices. The logical question is this may be how duplicate contacts are appearing.

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